Share this

Fights over state-led climate programs are heating up -- particularly in California. In the Golden State, oil giants Valero and Tesoro are spearheading a November ballot initiative to derail the state’s landmark 2006 law capping its greenhouse gas emissions -- the country's strongest policy to tackle global warming, absent federal policy, POLITICO reports. Proposition 23 would block the state’s carbon dioxide limits until the unemployment rate drops to 5.5 percent or lower for four consecutive quarters (right now, unemployment currently is around 12 percent).

Should Proposition 23 pass? Critics of the law deem it a job-killer. Will that view prevail? Or will environmentalists have the upper hand in California?

Proposition 23 is a cruel deception that seeks to exploit public anxiety over California’s struggling economy. Financed by out-of-state Big Oil, it falsely claims that clean air and clean energy standards will cost Californians jobs. It’s a big lie.

Rather, the clean-tech sector is among the few bright spots in California’s economy. Ever since California enacted AB 32 in 2006, it’s been clear that our state is open for business – clean business. Clear market signals have enticed investors to come here and invest. Clean tech jobs have grown 10 times faster than any other sector, now numbering more than 500,000, according to the stsate's Employment Development Department.

Far from being a drag on the economy, smart policies that support a clean-energy economy are good for all of us – for our pocketbooks and our lungs. The special interests who put Prop 23 on the ballot just want to protect Big Oil’s massive profits and restore its unfettered ability to spew pollution in to the air we breathe.

No wonder AB 32 enjoys broad support from those who really care about our state. Employers including Google and Levi Strauss & Co., along with a broad coalition of pro-consumer groups such as the AARP, the American Lung Association, the California Chamber of Commerce, the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, California Interfaith Power and Light, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and too many counties, cities and elected and business leaders to list support AB 32.

They all agree Prop. 23 is a lose-lose-lose proposition for California, one that would choke off job-creating investments for the 21st century and hurt public health.

On Nov. 2, California voters need to ask themselves: Do I trust out-of-state oil companies and their allies? Or do I trust my own instincts and the voices of public-minded California leaders who have my best interests at heart?

California's economic future depends on passing Proposition 23 and suspending AB 32. California's Democratic-controlled legislature and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have worked mightily the past few years to turn their state into an economic basket case. AB 32 is not the cause of California's current distress because it has not yet gone into effect, but it will become a major contributor to continuing economic decline in the near future. As Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit recently said, "I don't think we need to be the greenest Third World economy in the world."

California was the main economic engine pulling America forward for most of the past sixty-some years. That engine has been destroyed by its elected leaders through a wide array of economically disastrous policies. California once had a highly diversified economy that included considerable energy-intensive manufacturing. For example, California once had major auto assembly and airplane manufacturing plants. They are now gone. Californians may still buy two million cars a year and they may still take a lot of commercial flights, but the production of cars and planes has been outsourced to other states and countries.

Emissions are going down in California without AB 32 because businesses and people are fleeing the state. California has gained at least one seat in the U. S. Congress in every official census since 1860. It is now quite possible that California will lose one seat in the 2010 census. One of the reasons is that electric rates have already become among the highest in the nation as a result of government mandates.

It also needs to be recognized that the prospects that AB 32 will actually succeed in reducing greenhouse gas emissions are already looking poor. One key program is cap-and-trade. But Mary Nichols, chairman of California's Air Resources Board, the agency responsible for implementing AB 32, said at a public forum last month that California would not go forward with a cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions unless other states that have joined the Western Climate Initiative participate. That is looking highly doubtful. New Mexico is the only other state that has enacted the enabling legislation necessary to participate. Even greener-than-thou Oregon and Washington have so far refused to sign up. And both gubernatorial candidates in New Mexico have expressed opposition to the Western Climate Initiative.

The fact that the sate of California is now broke may force its government to reverse many disastrous policies. That will help to revive economic activity, but it is unlikely that sizable investments will be made in new businesses until the threat of the drastic energy-rationing measures required by AB 32 disappears. It is essential that voters pass Prop. 23. And if it happens in California on Nov. 2, it can happen anywhere.

Californians rejected the false choice of a clean environment or a good economy long time ago, and will do so again in turning back Proposition 23, which would pollute our air and cost us billions in job-creating private sector venture capital - giving us dirty air and a weakened economy. But that's not just a view from the coast or Silicon Valley - I'm writing from Mono County, Calif. -- a few miles from the Marine Corps training center listening to helicopters take servicemembers up to Sonora Pass for mountain training. The local paper talks about Green Living in Red Times - the search for 21st century clean tech jobs that can employ our troops here at home when they transition to civilian life. Community leaders here are eager for 21st century clean tech jobs and want to compete in it.

Proposition 23 in California this November is really Gettysburg – it is the defining battle in this decade's carbon wars.

Who's lined up to kill carbon limits in California? The press tells us it's oil companies and Koch Industries. You couldn't wish for more villainous villains if you called up central casting.

When California set out on the path that has successfully held electricity use per capita steady for 30 years while the economy grew at one of the fastest rates, in healthy ways, of any jurisdiction on this planet – no one said let's put it all on hold until we see what happens to this or that indicator. Because they understood that the objective was carbon limits PLUS growth and jobs – not one vs. the other. And they used those policies to drive growth, not to wait on the sidelines and see if growth "would happen."

That lessons is as true today as it was then.

Texas oil companies and Koch Industries? Now let me see if I've got this right. I'm supposed to believe that what's motivating them to pour money into this referendum is a concern that some low and moderate-income Californians won't have jobs? Those companies are spending money off their bottom line out of concern for the working folk of California?

Do they think we're just plain stupid?

Right battle in the right place at the right time. As the man said: bring 'em on.

It's important to note that all major oil companies with a presence in California do not support Proposition 23. The last thing these companies want is a public showdown with environmentalists who still control the political agenda in this state. Those pushing Prop 23 are attempting to import the political views of Texas into California. This has never been a winning strategy in the past and isn't likely to be this time.

Steve MaviglioSpokesman, No on 23; former New Hampshire House member :

Proposition 23 would undermine California's booming clean tech market: 500,000 jobs, $10 billion in venture capital investment, 7 of the top 10 companies in the United States. Out-of-state special interests are responsible for 89 percent of the money behind Proposition 23. Oil companies are responsible for 98 percent. Are Texas oil companies really out for California's best interests?

In the absence of federal standards of similar stringency (an increasingly unlikely scenario), California's greenhouse gas law won't just be a job-killer, it will be a homicidal unemployment machine.

By making almost any transportation, manufacturing or industrial development more expensive and -- very importantly -- more complicated, and by adding compliance and reporting requirements and litigation exposure that many businesses will find at least as onerous as the emission reduction effort, the law will be a far greater job killer than were the greater-than-federal mobile source pollution regulations imposed decades ago and tightened since then.

Greenhouse gas reduction may yet turn out to be worth the economic disruption, but that disruption is significantly amplified when the economy is in a slump and the net environmental benefits are both negligible and remote. It's why both Democrats and Republicans are arguing on Capitol Hill that the economy cannot handle a tax increase right now (although at least the tax increase might reduce the deficit), and why Obama had to argue so strenuously (and deceptively) that his health care reform would not increase employer health care costs at a time when businesses are slashing their payroll to better match their cash flow. Similarly, California's industries and their workforces are least able to handle the widespread cost increases that will accompany implementation of the greenhouse gas regulation.

Liberal Democrats and defensive environmentalists like to argue that the regulation will spawn new industries and jobs, but in fact the businesses they will create are the productive equivalents of breaking rocks or digging holes. Raising the cost of such universal production inputs as energy does not yield net growth, but instead diminishes it by producing fewer goods at higher prices for the same amount of national wealth expended. Recall the impact that paying more for imported oil has had on the trade imbalances and economic growth in the United States. Likewise, the Chinese may be selling lots of wind turbines right now, but not to themselves and not to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions.

Finally, it is simply a shame that the effort is being led by Valero and Tesoro, which, while being directly impacted, will be only a small part of the total economy-crushing effect of the law. In fact, those two mono-line giants will probably find compliance easier than many of the other, smaller and more diverse production and transport companies that will simply opt to leave the state or curtail the expansion plans that they would otherwise execute as the recession ends.

California's Proposition 23 that places a cap on carbon emissions is being fought primarily on the basis of how many jobs it might cost if it becomes fully effective. While it would cost many well-paying jobs that would mean more unemployment and a loss of the tax revenues from workers currently employed, it should be fought on the grounds that it will have no meaningful impact on Earth's temperatures.

Should California succeed in meeting the CO2 reduction goals, it would not change world wide temperatures by one tenth of one degree! If that makes no difference to the environmental community, many of whom want to do it because it simply makes them feel good, so be it but it makes no common sense. In actuality, the reduction of life-giving CO2 in the name of having a significant impact on climate change is a hypothesis that empirical evidence from studies of Earth's past climates refutes.

Either as a trigger of initial climate change or a cause of significant positive feedback to a warming Earth, CO2's footprint is not to be found in the historical studies. All of the catastrophic warming projections are coming from man-made computer models whose authors are highly incentivized to keep the threat of catastrophes alive. Hopefully, the recession and accompanying job losses will cause more citizens of California to examine the empirical evidence that refutes a significant role of CO2 in climate change and let that money be diverted into research needed in so many other, more worthwhile, fields of research.

More POLITICO Arena

About the Arena

The Arena is a cross-party, cross-discipline forum for intelligent and lively conversation about political and policy issues. Contributors have been selected by POLITICO staff and editors. David Mark, Arena's moderator, is a Senior Editor at POLITICO. Each morning, POLITICO sends a question based on that day's news to all contributors.